It’s good to be reminded of what else the Fringe can be. In the early days of the Vancouver Fringe, which launched 40 years ago, there was a whole lot more thematically challenging material on offer and much more solid dramatic writing. Since then, the Fringe has shifted towards comedy and relatively weightless confessionals. I appreciate skilled comic writing, but I’m grateful to David John Phillips, who performs the back-to-back monologues that make up 2 Queens. 2 Bars. 55 Years., and who wrote one of those monologues, for demonstrating that the Fringe can also provide an extraordinary opportunity for exploring depth. Both monologues are queer-themed, and both combine tenderness with audacity. In Matthew Baldwin’s I Miss the War, we’re in a London bar. It’s 1967, sodomy has just been decriminalized in England and Wales, and Jack, an old tailor, is worried about the queer culture that will be lost, a culture in which oppression hypercharged fleeting sexual encounters. Jack remembers having sex with a green-eyed American soldier during the Blitz and risking his life by staying above ground to do so. Eros and danger, such an intoxicating combo: no wonder its grooves — and the attendant mythologizing — are etched so deeply into Jack’s psyche. In Oh!, which Phillips wrote, he reappears as a leather queen in a Toronto bar in 2020. This time, danger takes the shape of shame. As a kid, the narrator learned to associate his homosexuality with humiliation and that led to a lifelong interest in masochism. Make no mistake, though: Oh! is not about pathologizing sexual variety, it’s about celebrating and embracing it. It’s about the mutability and wonder — the creative potential — of sex and gender. And there’s a kind of ecstatic relief when the narrator discovers a thoroughly inclusive underground tribe called the radical faeries (of which I’m a member), and takes the faerie name Oh!, as an expression of that wonder.
At the Vancouver Fringe Festival. Remaining performances at The Nest: September 9, 5:00 pm; September 12, 8:00 pm; September 14, 8:15 pm. Tickets
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